People with extraordinary memory talents suggest that your mind may be capable of retaining more than you think, says Adam Hadhazy.

Could people endowed with super-memories, then, have exceptional brains?

The short answer: no. Pi record holders, like Lu, as well as most winners of memory championships swear they are just regular people who have dedicated themselves to training their brains for holding and retrieving selected pieces of information.

Nelson Dellis, a USA Memory Championship winner, says that his memory was actually awful before he became a competitive mental athlete. Practice made all the difference. “Within weeks of training, maybe even less, you’re doing something that seems almost impossible to the normal person,” says Dellis. “We all have this skill within us.”